Right Thinking from the Left Coast

Tracking Nothing

Gun control is kind of a dead issue these days, at least in the US. If the Obama-Pelosi-Reid government wouldn’t dare bring forth a gun control measure, that tells you how discredited the anti-self-defense crowd is. And with Heller in place, we are set up for any legal challenges.

The gun grabbers are not beaten, however. They still want an unarmed America. The price of freedom … is making sure we keep up to date on stories like this:

Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday. Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities.

…

The statistics speak for themselves. From 2003 to 2009, there were 4,257 homicides in Canada, 1,314 of which were committed with firearms. Data provided last fall by the Library of Parliament reveals that the weapon was identified in fewer than a third of the homicides with firearms, and that about three-quarters of the identified weapons were not registered. Of the weapons that were registered, about half were registered to someone other than the person accused of the homicide. In just 62 cases — that is, only 4.7 percent of all firearm homicides — was the gun registered to the accused. As most homicides in Canada are not committed with a gun, the 62 cases correspond to only about 1 percent of all homicides.

Even in those 62 cases, Canadian authorities concluded the registry made no difference. Traditional police work and straight-forward confessions solved most of those. To put it simply, if you find a guy standing over the body of his wife’s boyfriend with a smoking baretta, the registration on the gun is unlikely to have been the case-cracker.

And Lott emphasizes something that needs to be tattooed on the ass of every big-government liberal: this registry came with a cost — $160 million a year, enough to hire 2000 cops or 2000 teachers. And I would be willing to bet that a couple of thousand of either would have done more good than his waste.

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I believe that most murders are categorized as being opportunistic, “heat of the moment” things – something your typical person is going to resort to the infamous “blunt object” and beat them to death.

Most people aren’t actively packing heat thinking about how to go kill someone and get away with it.

SO, one of my coworkers is married to a defense attorney. Almost all criminals cases end in a guilty plea because your typical criminal has neither the impulse control nor the intelligence to carry out a crime that’s remotely difficult to solve. That’s why they’re criminals. A typical case is where they went to the liquor store, found it closed, broke in and stole some liquor. It never occurred to them that a surveillance camera was there. He’s been in criminal practice for 25 years and has never had a case so difficult thst it needed DNA evidence.

Complex forensic stuff is a good idea. But let’s not labor under the illusion that CSI is a documentary, it’s very rare that things go beyond a few interviews.

I’ve met more than a few criminals in my day – most of them were idiots and very poor liars. Jury duty has reinforced perception. A marital arts buddy that worked as PD would every now and then tell stories about the types of morons he defended on a regular basis – the banal stupidity of their crimes was appalling. Makes you want to consider forced sterilization of inmates as a benefit to society.

Suffice to say, the most complex thinking I’ve ever seen on someone that’s served jail time for petty criminal crap was how to score drugs and hookers on any given night of the week.

Yeah, my wife is a prosecutor (happily she now does civil code enforcement-doesn;t have to hang out with violent dirtbags anymore). She has so many idiot criminal stories (bank robber who intimidated a clerk by pressing his ungloved hands against the plexiglass, bank robber who took the money across the street to Starbucks for a latte, bank robber who robbed bank with his car stereo, etc.). There are a few smart criminals out there. They are the ones that don’t get caught. A smart criminal isn’t going to go buy a gun from a licensed dealer that will then get back to him. Smart ones will buy a stolen gun and dump it in a lake.

The registry is just another “Look we did something instead of actually doing something” idea. Do you guys remember a few years ago when the Dems wanted to create a ballistic database? “Finger print” every gun sold? Every gun would be fired once and the bullet stored before the gun was sold so that they could use that info to match up murder weapons. I think a couple of states actualyl did this. If you are reading this and thinking “Wow, what a great idea” then you probably don’t know anything about firearms.

If you are reading this and thinking “Wow, what a great idea” then you probably don’t know anything about firearms.

You know, I don’t really know much at all about firearms, but 2 things pop into my mind just based on common sense..
1. Interchangeable parts.
2. Isn’t it relatively easy to modify the ballistics marks on a barrel anyway? and/or don’t they slightly change over time with use?

1. Interchangeable parts.
2. Isn’t it relatively easy to modify the ballistics marks on a barrel anyway? and/or don’t they slightly change over time with use

Bingo. Every shot fired down a barrel changes it. The first shot changes it the most; eariler shots change it more than later, etc, I;ve got about 1000 rounds out of my newest 9mm, bet you dollars to hollowpoints that its “signature” is different from my first round.

Oh and #1 is true, too. Change a couple of parts and you have a new fingerprint. Change one part and collect your brass (or fire a revolver) and same deal.

#3 is that most murders aren’t committed with a gun owned by the first buyer.

#4 There is no way to compare thousands of bullet automatically. It takes a human eye to look at two bullets and match them. If every gun in th US was ballsitically fingerprinted, there would be 100 million of them. You could narrow them down by caliber, but imagine a 9mm murder. You would have to painstakingly compare your murder round to what a million other bullets? Ten million?